This invention relates to positional tracking, locating, and guiding individuals and robotic devices within buildings and their nearby surroundings.
Emergency response operations in complex buildings, including high-rises, can require knowledge of a building""s floor plan. This allows the emergency response personnel to establish the best routes for entry into a building and exit out of a building, as well as, the best routes to a local emergency scene and any other specified location within a building and its nearby surroundings.
When an emergency, for example, a fire, occurs in complex buildings such as high-rises, the emergency response personnel need to be given the right information about the building, its entrances, its exits, and its access paths to various rooms, floors, stairways, and access corridors.
The emergency response personnel""s officers have a need to monitor their crew and equipment, in addition to knowing the crews whereabouts. Equipped with building floor plan information, the officers would be able to assign and guide their crew and equipment throughout the entire building and its nearby surroundings. Concurrently, the officers will be able to use the crew""s location information to ensure the safety of the crew.
Complex buildings and high-rises are required to have updated floor plans at all times to help emergency response personnel during emergency rescue and building evacuation. When the number of floor plans and the floor plans"" complexity increases, it is preferred and often required, to have the floor plan documents in digital format.
In general, it can be presumed that emergency response personnel may not be familiar with a particular building. This unfamiliarity makes it more difficult to quickly master a particular building""s floor plans. In some cities, building management is required to have a person available at all times to aid the emergency response personnel in reading a building""s floor plans, so that, in the event of an emergency, the emergency response personnel can be guided throughout the building and its nearby surroundings.
Even if floor plans are available in digital format and a person familiar with the building is available for help, the emergency response personnel would still have a need to know where they are within the building and its nearby surroundings at all times. At the very minimum, since the emergency response personnel""s officers will have to guide the emergency response personnel throughout the building and its nearby surroundings, the officers have a need to know where the emergency response personnel are within the building and its nearby surroundings.
Currently, various tracking, locating and guidance systems exist. These systems usually include one or multiple signal transmitters and receivers. Using the information from the transmitters and receivers, the system computes the relative positioning in real-time, i.e., the system can estimate the position of each receiver or transmitter in relation to others. Tracking, locating, and guidance systems can use triangulation techniques to estimate those positions.
The current tracking systems can be expensive and do not track an entity""s location in relation to a building""s floor plans. Additionally, it is not practical to equip all buildings with tracking systems.
A need exists for a portable tracking system that can be placed in a building, provide location data of an entity to be tracked, correlate the location data to a building""s floor plans, and display the entity""s location within the building.
A method according to an embodiment of the invention for tracking, locating, and guiding an entity within a building is described within the application. The method comprises, entering a digital floor plan of a building into a server, installing tracking device placeholders in the building, indicating the placeholder locations on the digital floor plan, activating tracking devices by connecting the tracking devices to the placeholders, using a server to receive location data transmitted by the tracking devices and to display the location data on the building""s digital floor plan.
A system according to an embodiment of the invention for tracking, locating, and guiding an entity within a building is described within the application. The system, comprises, a digital floor plan of a building, a server for processing the digital floor plan of the building, placeholders installed at various locations within the building for receiving the tracking devices, a location indicator device for indicating various placeholder locations on the digital floor plan, and tracking devices connected to the placeholders for reception and transmission of location data of the entity to the server for display on the digital floor plan.
The embodiments of the present invention will become more apparent from the following detailed description of illustrative embodiments thereof, which is to be read in connection with the accompanying drawings.